If you’re in New York, go see the Cindy Sherman retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art—it’s up through June 11—but don’t take my 13-year-old son. “This is creeping me out,” he said, even before we got to the museum, as we were walking down West 53rd Street and spotted some oversize posters advertising the show, five or six close-ups with Sherman’s head half a story high, each a de facto billboard that the uninitiated might assume was advertising mental illness, dementia, errant plastic surgery, or some combination of the three.

No wonder a teenager was disturbed. Sherman in her role-playing self-portraiture has done what might be the riskiest thing possible for a woman of our time (or any time, I’d wager): she has made herself look consistently awful in public, and for nearly four decades now. There she is, again and again, hiding behind spackle-like make-up and prosthetics, frump and fright wigs, lumpy costumes and swollen rubber breasts. She means to disturb, to detonate.

Her work is about many different things at once, which is why it’s good, but one thing it’s almost always about, whether Sherman is subverting pin-up poses or dissecting the vanities of middle- and upper-class portraiture, is women’s bodies: the way they present themselves to the world, and the way they are commoditized, coveted, abhorred by others—i.e., “the construction of female identity, established through visual codes like dress, hair, and makeup,” as MoMA’s catalog puts it, employing a language, Artspeak, not yet recognized by Google translate. Another Sherman subject: femininity “as an erotic construct and fetish of the male gaze”—i.e., my own translation, hotness.

As brilliant, ground-breaking, and still provocative as many of Sherman’s pictures are, I found the show uneven. Seen en masse, there’s a consistent intensity but also a sameness to the work, like a record where all the songs are at the same speed and pitch. It’s a good speed and pitch; you just want some modulation. Sherman might be an artist better stumbled upon piecemeal, by surprise, her images knocking you upside the head when you’re not expecting an impact. Someone should have some fun and go guerilla, take her pictures off the walls, and slip them into magazines and family photo albums—art by ambush.

But that’s an issue common to many museum shows, or at least those with some claim on upsetting social norms: the old preaching-to-the-choir problem. Which is how I’ll segue to Lena Dunham, whose smart, painful, and funny half-hour HBO comedy Girls has three more episodes to run before completing its first season. Dunham—in case you’re a first-time visitor to this Web site—writes, stars, and often directs this series about twenty-somethings groping their way toward adulthood in what pass for affordable, artist-friendly neighborhoods in Brooklyn. (Juli Weiner’s excellent recaps are here.)

Dunham’s concerns are entirely different from Sherman’s, but working for HBO, instead of for galleries and art magazines, she has been doing more than her fair share of visual-code subverting and male-gaze punking by A) frequently appearing naked on her show and B) being overweight and not particularly shapely. Context: Girls is preceded each Sunday evening by Game of Thrones, which features at least one gratuitous, model-perfect female disrobing per episode. The show also asks us to believe that medieval grooming standards adhered to 21st-century tastes.

Dunham, meanwhile, tacitly asks us to accept her less-than-perfect body and desire it, or accept that men on the show desire it, even if her character has a nasty self-loathing streak, and even if her weight is the butt of jokes, her own and others’. (“She doesn’t look like Camryn Manheim,” snaps her gay ex-boyfriend’s new boyfriend after meeting her in the season finale.) I’ve had both men and women tell me Dunham’s nudity makes them not want to watch the show—it “creeps them out,” to borrow a phrase—which is sad on so many levels. Even fans invariably say her nude scenes are “brave,” an admiring but also condescending adjective they would never use for Halle Berry’s nude scenes.

So is this the most transgressive thing a female artist can do in 2012: be fat, naked, and unashamed on TV? I’d love to see some kind of collaboration between Dunham and Sherman, on either woman’s turf. (I wonder if they’re fans of each other’s.) All the same, you could add Dunham and Sherman and multiply the result by a thousand and, in terms of cultural noise, you still wouldn’t get Beyoncé, whose concerts last weekend at Atlantic City, judging from the reviews and news coverage, were primarily conceived to celebrate the fact that she’d lost her baby weight and returned to presentability. “She first appeared in a silhouette, focusing on her middle section, which is back in action,” observedThe New York Times on Monday. The next day a Google search for “post baby body” turned up 572 news articles.

Nothing against Beyoncé, though: no one really expects her to get radical with her visual codes. But how about supposed dare-devils such as Madonna or Lady Gaga? Maybe they could eat a few Doritos, or stop shaving their armpits? That might fuck with some male gazes.